I sift through fragments of my personal experience, recollecting and reforming them, trying to make a whole. I see myself buried in the present, so I am both the searcher and the object. Often this search uncovers only the void—the negative imprint, the woman who isn't there—as I encounter the inaccessibility of memory, the silencing of voice, the constraints of culture and the limitations of intellect.
In the Matrix series, four life size mixed media constructions integrate layers of drawing and layers of handwritten text around the imprint, the negative form, of a woman who is no longer there. This imprint, like a fossil matrix, is formed from the layers of information—personal, psychological, poetic, cultural, scientific, philosophical—through which she has come.
These mental fossils are organized from interiority to exteriority, and from darker and oilier to drier and lighter. The bottom layer of each is a drawing of a female form, saturated and rubbed with oil and embedded with dreams and private language. The second layer is poetry I have internalized, from Rainer Rilke to Adrienne Rich; the third layer is the background noise of my mind—popular songs, legal jargon, personal history. The fourth layer contains excerpts from my readings exploring aspects of language, culture, the physical universe and the body and examining the need for cultural transformation.
The writing, which took hundreds of hours, was an extended ritual. The text had to be written by hand; it had to relate to my body, to my memory and my experience. I xeroxed my sources for each layer, cut them into fragments, and selected them at random. Because of the design of the layers, the fragments become more fragmented as lines abruptly end at the edges. Words and phrases begin to group vertically, and new lines of reference formed among the sources, like channels flowing down the surface of the written layers. |